


The Rose Petal

by Snegurochka



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-03
Updated: 2007-11-03
Packaged: 2017-10-10 22:28:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snegurochka/pseuds/Snegurochka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>This is your best memory of him, the one that sustains you later, through all the lies.</i></p><p>5,700 words. NC-17. Snape/Lupin and Snape/Harry. Sort of. Non-con, captivity. Written for snupin_santa. November 2007.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rose Petal

**Author's Note:**

> Written for nehalenia at the 2007 snupin_santa exchange, who asked for: _slave-fic where Severus is owned by Harry and Remus buys/begs/steals him away due to real or perceived mistreatment_. This is sort of a twisty take on that prompt. Many thanks to busaikko and islandsmoke for the beta work.

"Tighter."

An annoyed sigh from the gallery. Cold hands over his face. Pain in the back of his head.

"I said, _tighter_. He can still see."

Another tug. The knot catching hair, yanking.

"Pull it. Fucking. _Tighter_."

"Look, Potter. You want it done different, go on and do it yourself. I ain't got all night here."

"No, but you'd have twenty-five Galleons in your pocket, courtesy _me_, if you'd done this right the first fucking time. Now charm the blindfold and fuck off."

Grumbling. Fading footsteps. Breath close to his face. Someone was still there, and judging by the smell, he had just slipped a rose petal into his pocket. Snape turned his head. _Potter_. He opened his mouth to speak, his lips barely touching over the first letter of the name.

"Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you. Say my name, Snape, and it'll make this real."

"I just heard your name," he muttered.

"I'm not pretending I'm not who I am," said Harry. "Just don't need that mouth of yours fouling up my name. Don't use it. Ever."

Names held truths, though, Snape found himself thinking. Pseudonyms, middle initials, endings chopped off for sounding too Polish – they all bled truth from their hacked off bits. He could argue the opposite, of course, that names masked what should be kept hidden. But in this case, Snape knew better than that. "Tell me where I am," he said wearily, the stone beneath his knees beginning to cool and chafe.

He didn't expect a straight answer, but nor did he expect the blow that landed across his face. "Shut up," he distantly heard, before all sound faded from his mind and he fell over, relieved for a short moment that the pressure was off his knees.

*

He woke. It was dark.

No, that wasn't the place to start. Of course it was dark; blindfolds would do that.

He woke; it was dark; and he was lying on his side on a cold floor, wrists bound in front of him and a headache that could blind a dragon pounding at the base of his skull. Sitting up seemed a terrible idea, so he resisted it. Surely nothing more could be accomplished sitting than could be accomplished lying on his side, especially if he was where he suspected he was.

_Potter_.

He sniffed. No scent. No, that was a lie: there was a scent, but it was not an important one; therefore, he decided to imagine that it was not there at all. No scent, because the scent of wood and blood did not matter: the wood was on the walls, and the blood was coming from his head, and none of that information would help him escape, so there was no use filing it away in his mind. He needed to keep space available for the storage of more important details than the wood and the blood.

_Potter_.

He listened. No sound. No, that was a lie: there was a sound, but it was not an important one; therefore, he decided to imagine that it was not there at all. No sound, because the distant sound of bells chiming did not matter: he was in a hut somewhere in a Muggle village, clearly, with merry church bells singing to those oblivious to a Wizarding war raging around them, and none of that information would help him escape, so there was no use filing it away in his mind. He needed to keep space available for the storage of more important details than the distant chiming bells.

_Potter_.

He tasted. No, that was wrong. There was nothing to taste. He stopped his tongue as it tried to slide past his parted lips and ordered it back inside his mouth. Pointless.

_Potter_.

He touched. No, that was wrong. There was nothing to touch. Not anymore. He stopped his desperate fingers as they began to stretch out, uncurling from their fists and searching for... what? Skin? That was no longer his to want. His fingers would never again drag up his lover's chest, light as a feather, eliciting the most sensual moans and gasps. They would never again twist around thick strands of hair, clenching and pulling as his body lit up and his pleasure crested. They would never again trace scars in the wake of the moon, soothing and mending by virtue of their mere presence. Skin on skin. Pointless.

_Potter_.

He saw. There were some things the blindfold couldn't mask, after all, despite his captor's best efforts. He saw all of them.

*

_You love him, or so you think. He is everything to you, your entire world wrapped up in one mortal man. You were not supposed to fall this hard, or this irreversibly. It was foolish, weak. You were only supposed to use his body, take your pleasure, and cast him aside. He is incapable of love, after all._

His body pulled you in, though, didn't it? It's a body you should have resisted, one you knew would never cause you anything but pain. Loving him is like tracing a blade over the valves of your heart every time you wake up. Every taste of his skin is a new incision, precise and exacting. Every time it bleeds, and every time you are surprised to find you can't live without it.

It is odd, then, that you should wind up betraying him.

Or, perhaps it is not odd. Perhaps it is simply revenge for his own betrayal. Or perhaps betraying him is the perfect way to cauterise the wound at last.  
  


*

"Eat."

A door slammed somewhere on the opposite wall from his head, and Snape blinked, his eyelashes scraping the fabric. He considered the request. "I would, if I could see the fucking plate," he called, and then berated himself for his language. It would not do to let Potter know that Snape was at all bothered by this inconvenient little stunt.

The door flew open again. "Say another fucking word, and I'll kick it in your face."

"Amateur, Potter," said Snape. "The proper answer would be to remove my meal entirely, should I utter another word. If it's on my face, I might still eat it."

"I thought I told you not to use my name."

Snape paused. "This is childish. Take the blindfold off."

"Nice try. And crawl over here and eat the fucking soup. You're no good to me starved."

"No good for what, precisely?"

"Sitting in this cell for the rest of your fucking life, listening to the loop in your head of Professor Dumbledore's voice, begging for his life." Potter's voice cracked at the end, and Snape sighed. So that's what this was about.

"As usual, you have no idea what you're talking about."

"And as usual, your famed skill with a wand – or without one – has been highly overrated, it seems." He felt Potter crouch down beside him. "Tell me, Snape, have you figured out how to get that blindfold off yet?"

Snape stilled, his eyes instinctively darting in the direction of the voice.

Potter laughed. "I thought so." A dish scraped along the floor towards him before the door slammed once more. "_Eat_."

*

_You trace the contours of his body in the dark solitude of your mind. His skin alights under your touch, heating gradually from a simmer to a burn. You use your fingers and your mouth in tandem, exploring every bulge of muscle and curve of flesh, his chest rising and falling with increased rapidity as your lips work their way up from his toes to his thighs, stomach, chest, shoulders, and neck, before covering his own lips and setting you both on fire.  
_   


*

Snape began by counting the hours, but he soon switched to counting the days. Days were easier to count, although hours kept him busy longer.

He sighed.

He'd been captive before; that wasn't the problem. He'd even been starved and beaten before; that wasn't the problem, either. At least Potter insisted on feeding him, although the soup was full of water and salt at the expense of meat and vegetables, and at least he'd taken the bonds off his hands. The blindfold stayed, though, irritating the bags under his eyes, and he wondered if they had become blacker, or redder, while he'd been in there. Black bags under his eyes suited his demeanour, after all, but scratches of red sounded appealing as well. There was a war on. It wouldn't do to become too attractive.

He almost smirked at that, which only made him think that he really had been in there too long, to be laughing at his own weak jokes.

Potter came in three times a day and each time, he asked the same question:

"Why did you do it?"

It was tiresome, really, and Snape would have told him so, if not for the nagging pain in the back of his head that reminded him that he'd been asking himself the very same question for the past week, and although he knew the answer – it was necessary for the war; it was on Albus's orders; it couldn't have been any other way; and so on and so forth – he still couldn't bring himself to push it through his lips. Saying it would make it real, and making it real would mean that he'd actually _done it_, and that was all a bit more than he cared to be getting on with at the moment.

He tried to ignore the veil of blackness in front of his eyes that seemed programmed to replay Albus's final moments over and over again on a loop, increasing with frequency the longer he sat in the cell, and he tried to ignore the fact that there was still a man out there who was even more disappointed in him – more blindingly _enraged_ with him – than he was with himself, or with Albus. He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck and pushing that man out of his mind, hoping instead that Draco had at least reached Malfoy Manor by now.

*

_You used to fear him, didn't you? Even more than he feared you. You feared he would hurt you, betray you. He bleeds pure evil under the right circumstances, after all. You avoided him for years out of fear and misunderstanding, and it was only fate that finally brought you together. Fate, or possibly fate's cruel joke. The pair of you taught classes during the day that year and fell into bed together at night, each passing week and month not diminishing your desire, as you both had expected, but strengthening it until you felt like your veins were sealed together. You were bound to him, as though you shared one heart and its four pumping valves. As though you bled the same red and came the same white, alone together in the shadows of his rooms.  
_   


*

"It's remarkable that your Auror and Weasley guardians have let you out of their sight," ventured Snape one afternoon, having decided it was afternoon by virtue of the fact that he was hungry and cranky.

Potter didn't answer right away. "They didn't need to," he said at last. "They're helping me."

"Potter," said Snape pointedly, "I may be a murderer in your eyes, and any number of other frightfully evil things, but I would like some credit for my intellect. If they were helping you, I would be in Ministry custody by now, not in–" he paused, waving his hand around to feign ignorance of his surroundings – "wherever it is you have me."

"Maybe my orders are just to keep you here while they get the Dementors and– and– get your cell ready in Azkaban."

Snape frowned. This entire conversation was pedestrian to the point of insult. "Perhaps," he said, and then he paused for effect. "Would you get a message to Auror Shacklebolt for me?"

Potter's breathing hitched. "Why?" he said, too loudly.

Snape shrugged. "Not your concern. But I might have information for him."

"About what? Tell it to me."

"No. What about Auror Tonks?"

"What? Shut up, Snape. Just– stop talking."

"I asked a simple question, Potter."

"Yeah, well, she's busy. Going on leave, or something." He paused, and Snape heard the breath that rattled hard through his nose. "Pregnant," he muttered, kicking his chair back audibly and storming over to the door. It swung open and crashed closed, and Snape was abruptly left alone with nothing but aching silence for a companion.

He sat back against the wall, the blackness behind the blindfold swelling and twisting as his eyes dried and shrivelled. It wasn't possible. No, it was entirely possible. The breath faded in his chest and he had to remind himself that it didn't matter; he didn't care. Lupin could shag whomever he wanted; impregnate whomever he fucking wanted; run off and have a home and a family and anything else he thought he would be getting in the bargain. He tried not to calculate just how much of Lupin's anger might have been unleashed on that woman, and how much he'd have kept in reserve for Snape himself.

For the first time all week, he noticed that closing his eyes did not help shut out the world, and opening them did not help illuminate it. The world was covered in darkness no matter what he did.

*

_You betrayed him once already, the night the wolf attacked the children, and he betrayed you, too. It's what the two of you do best, after all, an endless cycle of fucking, betraying, and punishing. A "pattern," the psychoanalysts would call it, but so what? So you're both too damaged to trust and love like normal human beings. Trust and love are too easy anyway, what with pain and hate waiting right next door, beckoning to you, whispering softly in your ear and welcoming you with open arms.  
_   


*

Snape was breaking; he could feel it. Dammit! It was awful, humiliating, _insulting_ that Potter should win at this. He had no knowledge of the true methods of captivity and torture, and yet he had still managed to succeed where other captors had not. He had managed to make Snape ask questions and ponder answers that he had no business asking or pondering or expressing _any_ interest in whatsoever.

Somehow, Potter had gained the upper hand.

Snape spent the minutes (hours? days?) counting hippogriffs and reciting potions ingredients, doing everything he could think of to keep the memories at bay. But still they crept up the back of his neck and penetrated his skull, pounding at his mind and screaming for him to acknowledge them, to lose himself in them.

He knew exactly why he was there, after all, and exactly what he would need to do to get out, but even knowing that didn't make the seeping memories any easier to take. They were of a lost time, a time before murder, a time when he had let passion get the best of him.

A time when he had bared his heart and gone up against the most searing form of manipulation, and lost everything.

*

_You are not easily shattered, but listening to him moan underneath you as you push into his body is something that can do it, melting every last bit of your reserve until you're forced to let all your emotions collapse. You feel his body yield around your cock as you drive deeper, sucking you in and warming you from the inside out. It's his loss of control that pulls you under entirely, and you can only clutch at his hair, smoothing your palm over his forehead and into the crumpled remnants of the pillowcase as you surge forward, harder and harder, fucking him with blissful abandon._

He never comes first; he is too controlled for that; but you always try your best to make him. You murmur strings of filth into his ear and feel his heels dig into your back in response, his moans deepening and the cords of his neck straining as he pushes back against the pillow.

"Fuck," he breathes, a word you rarely hear him use except in extraordinary circumstances, like this. "God, fuck. Harder. God, yes, like that."

There is passion inside him, although few would suspect it. You love to bring it out, to reduce him to this: a writhing, desperate man pulling your body close to his and whispering his willingness to do anything – anything_ – for you. Later, you might be forced to abuse that trust, but only because in your mind, he abused yours first._

You puncture his shoulders with your fingernails when you come, stabbing into his body as hard as you can and stilling, as a searing heat tears down your spine and up your balls. Your cock pulses frantically, shooting hot come inside him that feels brilliantly wet and dirty as it pools and begins to slip out again. As usual with him, your orgasm seems to stop time, and for a long, shuddering moment the world narrows to just the two of you and the fog of hot, panting breaths against each other's cheeks.

You pull out of him slowly, trailing come over the sheets and the insides of his thighs as you bite your way down his chest and stomach, arriving at his swollen cock and swallowing him down whole. His back arches and he shouts, reaching back to punch the wall behind his head as he comes almost instantly, the warmth of your mouth, the soft pressure of your tongue and the throbbing ache in his arse all he needs to stimulate his own release. Your throat works to take in every drop, greedy and thirsty for him, his low gasps of continued pleasure echoing in your ears.

This is your best memory of him, the one that sustains you later, through all the lies.  
  


*

Once, Potter came to him at night.

Slamming the cell door open so hard it reverberated off the wall behind it, Potter stormed in with renewed rage and immediately cast a spell to bind Snape's hands again. The blackness of night seemed to spark something in him, some reminder of Snape's crimes that didn't affect him as much during the day. Snape could tell night from day by this time, although not by the light or the sounds. It was the smell. The world smelled different at night, he decided. It was denser, fouler – like rainwater poured through leaves and set aside to mould.

"Tell me why you did it," Potter shouted, his breath thick with whisky and his boot making contact with Snape's back.

"You are not yet seventeen years old," muttered Snape, wincing. "You do not understand the things grown-ups need to do."

"Shut up," he spat, crouching down to Snape's prone form. "I asked you for an answer, not a patronising way of evading that answer."

"Big words, Potter," drawled Snape, flinching as Potter rose again and the boot connected with his shoulder. "So, I see the blindfold trick exhausted your store of magic," he added, panting over the burn in his back. "Should I expect that this foray into corporal punishment will continue?"

Potter hesitated, and behind the blindfold, Snape pictured his wide-eyed stare, blinking in confusion. "Yes," he said slowly. "You should."

Ah. Not a wide-eyed stare, then. More like a narrowing of coldly calculating eyes, sizing up his prey. Snape would have to work on his images of the world beyond the blindfold. He couldn't afford to misread the situation again.

Even the most logical and rational of men could be blinded by rage, and Potter had never been the most logical or rational of men to begin with. What was coming next would certainly _seem_ logical and rational to a man so full of rage that he could barely see straight, a man stripped raw by confusion and betrayal, lashing out at the one person he held responsible. Slowly, Snape crawled across the floor and rose to his knees, before dropping to his elbows, his wrists still bound together. He said nothing.

He felt rather than heard Potter open his belt, catching the way the air currents shifted as it fell free of his trousers.

He smelled rather than felt the coarse fingers that shoved his robe up and scraped down his back.

He tasted rather than saw the drop of blood that formed over his bottom lip as he bit through it, the moment Potter entered him.

"He begged you for his life," Potter sobbed, pushing forward until Snape's forehead touched down against the cold floor. "_Begged you_, and you had no right... You just... I can't even look at you, can't think about you..." He grabbed Snape's hips and moved quickly, his tear-stained face dripping over Snape's back and his litany of confusion and regret hovering in the room's stale air. Orgasm, when it came, was not joyful but perfunctory, plain, a mere signal that it was over rather than a way of noting what had really only just begun.

Potter laid his cheek flat between Snape's shoulder blades for a brief moment, and Snape felt heated glasses shoved up to a forehead and the scrape of wet eyelashes against his skin. His body burned and his mind fell blank as Potter pulled himself away and scrambled to his feet. Snape shook his robe back down over his body and collapsed to the floor, breathless.

"You didn't stop me," said Potter from the door, his voice shaking.

Snape was silent for a long minute, thinking only of the way the velvet of a rose petal always felt on tired fingers. "No," he said at last. "I didn't."

"You could have."

"Of course."

"Then... why?"

The red velvet between his fingers turned to shards of glass. "You should know better than to ask questions to which you already know the answer," said Snape softly.

*

_The war thickens, knotting around your skull and pulling tight until you can barely see what you are doing anymore. The bodies begin to pile up, just like the first time, sixteen years ago. You remember that war, too, and the prices you paid in it. You are determined not to lose your loved ones again this time. You are determined to do whatever it takes to keep him safe._

When you ask him about that, he just stares at you as if you are mad. "Safe?" he repeats.

"Yes," you reply, leaning in to lick at his chest and distract him. "Safe. You know the meaning of the word."

But he doesn't, not really. He is reckless, running off to liaise with dangerous enemies when you aren't looking; following orders no sane man could possibly be expected to follow; and insisting all the while that it is all part of his "duty to the cause," his way of fighting.

"How far are you willing to go?" you ask him one night, the sheets cooling around you and the sight of his back causing your heart to clench as he rolls away from you.

"How much are you willing to forgive?" he counters, and you curse him in your head because he knows there are some things you would never forgive. You would rather be captured and tortured than forgive the things he will have to do before this war is done.  
  


*

Potter didn't speak for four days afterwards. He only entered, left, and stared at Snape during the time in between. Snape felt heavy eyes on him in those in-between hours, moving over his body and taking in the sight of bone and muscle and flesh where it appeared outside the confines of Snape's dirty robe.

"Was that your first time having sex?" Snape called softly one day, fed up with being a zoo exhibit.

Potter swallowed. "What?" he croaked.

"Well, we might as well talk about it, since you aren't letting me out of here anytime soon, and I've had quite enough of being stared at. So. Was it?"

He had intended to rattle the boy, but Potter surprised him. "That wasn't sex," he muttered. Snape's lips parted a little bit.

"Ah. I suppose you have incredibly romantic but misguided notions of what sex entails? Cuddling, and such?" He tried to smirk. It didn't work. Perhaps it had been folly to bring this up.

"I don't know what sex entails," said Potter. "I only know what love entails."

"Love," sneered Snape. "Yes, I would expect that answer from you. Well, love is the most dangerous emotion of all," he mused, jerking his head up when Potter laughed.

"Yeah, I agree, but I can't believe _you_ would know the first thing about it."

"You might be surprised," said Snape quietly, thinking of nights when he had let himself shudder and come completely undone by the mere brush of the right fingertips over his heated skin. "But you haven't answered me. _That _certainly wasn't love, and so if it also wasn't sex, what was it?" he said. "Passion, rage, something of that sort, I imagine?"

"No." Potter was at his side before Snape had even heard him cross the room, crouching low and brushing his nose over the shell of Snape's ear. "That was betrayal," he whispered.

*

_You are not one for romance, not really, even though he thinks you are. So what? You let him think it. But there is something about the coarse-velvet feel of a rose petal that excites and unnerves you. Once, you conjure a rose for him and lay it on his pillow. He glances over at you and smirks, before picking it up – carefully placing his fingers and thumb between the thorns – and twirls it in front of you. You roll over onto your back and he moves on top of you, straddling your hips and tracing the rose gently down your stubbled jaw line, your throat, your chest, your stomach, and then gliding it slowly over your thickening cock. _

It feels like liquid sandpaper, you decide, and you don't even know if that's possible, if that's a real feeling, but that's what you call it. He sits back on his heels and moves his fingers up the stem of the rose until they are just under the petals, and then he hardens his strokes. The gentle glide of the flower over the stretched skin of your prick turns desperate, and he begins to grind it into you.

You arch your back and groan, your hands clawing at his thighs where they straddle you and pin you down, the exquisite torture over your cock driving you mad. The petals mash against your skin, staining you red even as white hot come begins to surge out of you, jerking from your prick as he tosses the ruined flower aside and fists you to completion. He squeezes too hard, wrenching a moan from your lips as you shout his name and feel the crest of pleasure like a thorn stabbing through your body.

Later, when you have finished fucking him senseless and he has fallen asleep, you salvage the rose from the bottom of the bed and pluck a single crushed petal from it. He would roll his eyes at you if he knew, of course, but sod it. You carry it around with you because it reminds you of him, and as the war drags on and you begin to hear more and more about the terrible things he has done, you find you need that reason to think of him as the petal, not the thorn.  
  


*

The stench of blood had long since faded from the room, and the bells no longer chimed in the village. The soup was tasteless and touch of any kind no longer motivated him. Potter had succeeded: Snape was broken.

"Why did you do it?" asked Potter for the last time, entering the room and curling his fingers around the side of the door. Snape listened for the crack of Potter's third knuckle against the wood before answering for the first time. He smoothed the blindfold over his eyes and looked up at the door.

"Because there are no boundaries left," he sighed. "There are only strategies now, impersonal, military and intelligence strategies that do not recognise boundaries between right and wrong. But the funny thing is," he added, letting his head fall back against the wall behind him, "none of the strategies matter, because this war will be won or lost on emotion, not strategy. There's only love and hate, trust and rage. I let the wrong one take over, and now he's dead. It fits the strategy, certainly," he continued, "but there would have been ways around that."

"Trust and rage," murmured Potter, his voice small and distant across the cell. "Is that everything?"

"Yes," said Snape without hesitation. "And passion, maybe. I thought you knew that."

Potter considered this. "I thought I did, too." He paused. "Would you do it again?" he asked quietly, and Snape frowned.

"No," he whispered, despite knowing it was a lie, despite knowing it was the wrong answer and one that Albus himself would never, ever forgive.

*

_He's said it, then, or his version of it. At last. That's all you really wanted to hear. He was sorry.  
_   


*

_You leave the room for the last time with that face and wait silently outside the door until the hour is up. It didn't matter; the blindfold was air tight; but somehow you couldn't have done this any other way. Slowly, you feel your skin roil as though infused with larvae, and in another minute, your body has thickened, your chest has grown more hair, and the tight scar at your forehead has melted into mere worry lines._

You rake a hand through your hair and change your clothes before seeing about the noise: with your wand out, you blast away a nearby wall and conjure a few extra shrieking sounds from different voices, for realism.

"Get Harry!" you shout. "Stun him, now, now!" More wandwork – bustle and crashes and shrieks – before you burst through the door of the cell.

"Severus," you moan, falling to your knees and cupping his face. "My God, what has he done to you?"

If he looks at you, you can't tell. The blindfold holds firm; there is no telling what lies behind it. No telling what lies have been told from behind it.

"We've got to– I'll ask him how to get this off," you say, fumbling unexpectedly, your fingers moving over the dark fabric covering his eyes.

"You should be angry, Lupin," he says to you, his voice surprisingly calm. "I killed him in cold blood, after all – the leader of the resistance, the only one capable of bringing down the Dark Lord. You should be furious with me. You_ should have been the one to lock me up and assault me for it, not Potter."_

He pauses, staring at you through the blindfold, challenging you to answer, and your hands begin to shake as you smooth them over his face. "You had no choice," you insist, still struggling to believe it. "Right? You couldn't have."

"No choice," he agrees, and you sigh, squeezing your eyes closed against the throbbing in the back of your head.   
  


*

Snape waited until Lupin had run back down the hall, hollering at an invisible someone to ask Potter about the blindfold spell, before he lifted his hands to the back of his head and, with slow and measured movements combined with a few whispered words, untied the knot. The material fell from his face with a soft _swish_, landing on the floor in front of him in a dark puddle. He blinked, pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, and then stared down at it.

Let him have his revenge, Snape decided. He had earned the right.

*

He woke. It was dark.

No, that wasn't the place to end. Of course it was dark; midnight was like that.

He woke; it was dark; and he was lying on his side on a warm bed, one arm slung over the naked, muscled body beside him and a jarring sense of peace stealing over him. Sitting up seemed a terrible idea, so he resisted it. Surely nothing more could be accomplished sitting than could be accomplished lying on his side, especially if he was where he suspected he was.

"Lupin," he murmured, his fingers stretching out and sliding over a hairy chest as he pressed his body up against Lupin's back.

"Mm." The body stirred, but just barely, settling back against him. "Sleep, Severus," he mumbled. "You've been through a terrible ordeal."

Snape thought about that for a moment, tightening his grip on Lupin's chest. "Yes," he decided, his lips moving over Lupin's shoulder in the dark. He waited until Lupin was snoring softly again before burying his nose in Lupin's hair and letting out the breath he'd been holding for two weeks. "And so have you," he added in a whisper. "Lupin," he added, "how much are you willing to forgive?"

He thought Lupin was asleep. It caught him off guard when he rolled over and punched the pillow under his head, kneading it into a little ball that he shoved back under his head, his eyes still closed and his body still warm beside Snape's. "Depends how far you're willing to go," he murmured without opening his eyes.

Glancing over at the bedside table, he saw the ragged rose petal sitting quietly beside Lupin's clock and reading glasses, its fading red blooming like a blood-darkened shadow. It was nearly time to go. He'd been missing for too long now, and the Dark Lord would be quite interested in the plan about the seven Potters.

He kissed Lupin's hair, settled back against the bed and closed his eyes, trying for another hour's sleep. He smiled.

 

-fin-

 

**Note:**  
The other prompt Neha asked for that this story incorporates was: _post-HBP where Remus feels angry, distrustful, betrayed and goes to find/hunt down Severus_. But I couldn't tell you that at the beginning. ;)


End file.
